AP Poll

The 2013 college football AP preseason poll has been released an Michigan is sitting at #17.

The top five is Alabama, Ohio State, Oregon, Stanford, and Georgia.

Other B1G teams in the rankings include Nebraska at #18, Northwestern at #22, and Wisconsin at #23. Michigan State is sitting just outside the rankings as the highest ranking team in the "others receiving votes" category.

As I was reading through fellow fans' reactions to recent recruitment news, someone had mentioned that 'recruiting doesn't really matter.' I'd read that several places, and in the back of my mind I probably didn't believe it. So, I decided to see if the quality of the class as measured through the eyes of a scouting site really did matter.

Turns out, it may not really matter. (Note: This isn't an end all be all of an analysis, and I'm not an expert on Statistics, Recruiting or Women. I also only looked at the top 12 as this takes a lot of time, plus it afforded me another opportunity to disrespect Ohio.)

Alabama and LSU have consistently strong classes, and the oversigning debacle probably helps them out some more. They along with USC seem to perform commensurate with expectations.

Some of the interesting items are the massive difference between expectations and results for a few select schools: Boise St, Michigan St, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma St and Notre Dame. You can see for yourselves, but Boise St rocks it with classes that are rarely in the top 50%. Their average class is sitting at 70. Texas and Notre Dame have the opposite problem.

You clearly need to have quality players. However, strong coaching, an eye for talent and knowing how to use and motivate that talent go far. Also, it may suggest that these recruiting services "one size fits all" approach to ranking players and classes is largely irrelevant to a team's performance. There's a long list of 5* failures and world beating 3* guys.

I didn't do a regression analysis as I'm a) lazy, b) not The Mathlete and c) things seem fairly obvious after perusing the data. Also, any laser focus on a single aspect of a team's record will probably miss the forest for the trees, but I'm just trying to provide some evidence on this point specifically.

Let's talk data sources and definitions. I used the final AP Ranking for this past season. The class ranking data is from Scout. I imagine it would be easy enough to bump this against some of the other scouting services to see what they say, as well as perhaps the Coach's Poll and whatnot, but I my imaginary army of minions was busy doing something else. So, this is what we're left with.

The "Average Class" is the class average from 2007 through 2011. I felt that the 2012 rankings, while somewhat finalized, aren't really part of this equation, yet. More just a "that's kinda interesting" rather than a "I think there's something there."

The "Difference" is the difference between that aforementioned "Average Class" and the final 2011 AP Ranking.

The "2011 Rank - 2007/8 Class" is the 2011 AP Ranking minus the average of the 2007 and 2008 Recruit Class.